chapter 10
Understanding the Assignment
When it's a test that's being announced, students often feel a sense of great urgency. When will the test be? What will be on the test? How should I prepare for the test? So too, with papers. Only this time, the urgency is to delay. Why not put off addressing this unpleasant task till sometime far away in the future? Like a couple of nights before the due date. Come to think of it, the night before wouldn't be all that bad, either.
Surprisingly enough, this usually turns out to be not such an excellent strategy. That's because top-notch college papers aren't the sort of thing you can just throw together at the last minute. Successful papers are almost always the result of a process that takes place over an extended period of time. A process in which you think through -- and rethink through -- some issue. A process in which your mind continues to work on the problem or question, even when you're not consciously thinking about it. This process needs time to develop and gel. There's a big difference between papers that have been developed over a week or two -- with the ideas better thought out, more convincingly argued, and better written; and those papers written the night before -- which almost always have a coarse, rough-and-ready look. Professors are fully trained to recognize this difference in "look" between these two types of paper. And to capture that difference in the grade they mete out to each....
